The beau and I drove up to Canberra in the new mini on Friday. We helped a friend celebrate moving into her new townhouse, then drove back again yesterday.

I gave her a chocolate fountain as a housewarming present. It was a hit – food and entertainment in one handy applicance, and I suspect will get her invited to many, many parties. I learned two valuable lessons about chocolate fountains: adding cream makes the chocolate thicken and block up the fountain, but adding half a bottle of Baileys will successfully thin the chocolate again… and apparently the leftovers makes really nice hot chocolate.

On the way up we stopped at Tarcutta’s Farmhouse Industries Handcraft Shop as recommended by Ginger_Nut some months back, but there were only a dozen or so skeins left. Most in orange colourways (not me) or containing mohair…

… hmm, having just read her recent posts I think I can guess why their stock was so depleted. I’m not the only knitter following her recommendation!

I bought one little skein of handpainted wool in soft rainbow colours. The stop at Tarcutta was to distract myself from the temptation of detouring to the mill shop in Wangaratta, where I’m sure I’d make spectacular use of my “falling off the wagon” clause in the KFYS rules. Hmm. Does this one skein count as “falling off the wagon”?

While in Canberra my friend gave me the time-machine experience of entering a big clothing store that sold yarn down the back. And not just a few balls of acrylic, but Patons, Cleckheaton, Naturally and Anny Blatt – and both wooden, bamboo and rosewood needles! I wish I could remember the name of the shop and suburb, but I was so astonished to see the contents of a yarn store in what otherwise looked like a rather large old-fashioned clothing store that details just didn’t stick. I bought some bamboo sock needles, but no yarn, despite packets of tempting bamboo that whispered to me from the shelves.

Of knitting, there was steady progress on the first Mega Boots Red sock. Here it is with the weekend’s purchases:

I didn’t get a chance to separate the ball into repeated sections of colour gradients before we left, so I just started knitting. I’ll worry about that when I get to the second sock.

The sock had many admirers over the weekend. I so love this yarn.